I write a regular column, “Reinvention”, for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism magazine.
The focus of the column is changing ideas and norms in engineering education. Recent columns have discussed technology in the classroom, the role of self-efficacy in learning, and moving away from the post-World War II ‘culture of order’ in engineering.
[A] generation out from my own undergraduate engineering degree, I’ve spent a surprising amount of time unlearning what I learned in college, and I work with engineering educators to help them do likewise.
Demographic differences, such as gender, among engineering students don’t necessarily mean that we need to design different experiences for each group... Rather, any observed differences between genders are telling us that we have an axis along which the student experience varies; what we need to do, then, is design educational experiences that work for students along the entire axis.
[W]e live in a connected world where collaboration is becoming easier. Accordingly, we ask our engineering students to work in teams, and we often talk about leadership. But we rarely provide examples of either, leading our students to find their own models of teamwork and leadership. Many look to the military, hierarchical corporations, and the traditional patriarchal family.
What has changed for “kids these days” is, of course, the culture they live in. For engineering students, there are three major elements of this: the rise of the knowledge economy; the decline of stable, long-term employment; and advances in technology.
But women in engineering are told, in a host of small and subtle ways, that engineering is not for them. We see the effects of this in lower self-efficacy, higher dropout rates, and lower satisfaction in engineering.
Today, discussions about revamping engineering education often focus on the nation’s need to maintain a competitive economic advantage, as if commerce, technology, and innovation were a zero-sum game….But the reality is, our social, economic, and environmental systems are globally intertwined.
As educators, we should ask what values are being incorporated into the design of MOOCs. For a start, most MOOCs embody a particular pedagogical approach: that knowledge is transferred from an expert to a newcomer, rather than something that is constructed by the learner by their engagement.
But here’s the problem: From a learning standpoint, this approach misses the mark. Our engineering students aren’t the A-Team. They’re assigned the project as a learning exercise. If all the students do what they are best at, there’s a good chance they’ll end up minimizing what the team learns.
Teamwork, particularly early in a student’s education, isn’t just about efficient division of labor. Consider the first-year design team that builds a great prototype. If everyone in the group took on the task he or she already knew how to do well...the exercise is a failure. The point of an engineering course is not what students accomplish; it’s what they learn.
But the types of problems we expect engineering graduates to be able to address, such as the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges, involve complex interactions of technology, systems, and society. How do we help our graduates develop the ways of thinking they’ll need in order to address these types of problems?
We talk the talk — we ask our students to wrestle with new material every day — but we need to walk the walk ourselves, by learning new content or skills and bringing them to the classroom.